Hey, I hang out with a lot of creative people. Not Elon Musk, but Steve Jobs for more than a decade, and lots of people at least as smart that you don't know. They can be really brilliant, and successful, and they can still make really stupid mistakes and sell them to the rest of us pretty well because they believe in themselves completely and they have a track record. I've done that too.

That's the hyperloop. Something Elon never meant to stand behind (and still really isn't), just put out there to torpedo a worthy project that he didn't believe in.

Anyone who looks at the hyperloop design can see it's not a no-brainer. It has safety issues up the wazoo :-) It's going to take a long time to get right.

Meanwhile, little Switzerland can have incredible trains everywhere and the United States can't get it together, and unlike with rockets and cars Elon's not helping this time. And I am not sure that the "lease" part of his solar business is a great thing for the world either.

Although the hyperloop is possible and might even be practical someday, let's please be honest about the reason it was created. Elon Musk just wanted to kill the California high-speed rail.

That might have been OK if there was a hope that we could actually replace it practically with a hyperloop. But given the history of bleeding-edge rail - ride any maglevs lately? We haven't even had much success with monorails outside of theme parks and Las Vegas - we don't really have any working system to replace high-speed rail. Hyperloop should really be called "Pipes that carry People" and we need decades of work on it before considering intercity lines.

You have not identified any "fallacy".

Your posts are almost entirely fallacious reasoning. Red herrings, non-sequiturs, false dichotomies, straw men, circular reasoning, ad hominem. A veritable smorgasboard of broken reasoning. But that is to be expected from people that start at a conclusion and then try to reverse-engineer a trail of reasoning to reach it.

You have not identified any corporation, that quadrupled the price of its offering without improving quality (or due to spike in cost of raw materials).

You have not supported your premise that education today is identical to education in the 60s, nor that outcomes today are worse (or unimproved), let alone provided evidence - or even a rationalisation - that this change is a direct outcome of publicly-funded education.

The best performing education system in the world is generally considered to be Finland's, in which private schooling is all but nonexistent. Indeed, pretty much all the highest performing countries have education systems that are primarily publicly-funded. On top of that, widespread - near universal - high levels of education and literacy have only come about relatively recently with the wide availability of publicly funded education.

Consequently, the argument that publicly-funded education is inherently inefficient or low-performing is simply ridiculous on its face, and the argument that private suppliers can achieve the same outcome - given many millennia of failure to do so before the rise of public education - is sketchy, at best.

As I answered that poster and idiots like him. I want the government to [...]

You have failed to justify why these are the only two functions Government should perform. What you'd "like" is entirely up to you, but it carries no more weight than what I'd like - and at least what I'd like has some basis in reasoning, fact and evidence rather than ideology, paranoia and fear.

Statists expecting more from their government are, no doubt, welcome to Cuba and North Korea and the even much nicer Germany or Greece.

What's a "Statist" ? Someone who thinks Government has one more responsibility than you do ?

Fallacies are not convincing, so you could at least do us the courtesy of making them amusing. Though the absurdity of extremist positions does carry a certain amount of humour in itself.

Even a superficial look at the increase in productivity vs wages over the last few decades and how workers are being ripped off by "KKKorporations" will put paid to the idea that "only a government-backed racket can get away with such a thing".

As another poster said. If you want to live somewhere without Government, there are several of them. None are particularly nice places to be, however.

Although I do not like to follow this train of logic, it's important to point out that some laws are not immediately enforced at gunpoint.

Yes. Like tax laws. Glad you agree the original poster was just engaging in ideological claptrap. Not quite sure what the point of the rest of your post was.

People's food needs in the absence of government coercion are already taken care of by private actions: farming, jobs, and in extreme cases by charity.

No they’re not.

Education provided by the government is at least 2 to 4 times as costly as it needs to be for a good education.

Source, and please define “good education”.

All but the poorest parents can afford to pay for teachers, and private education reduces the likelihood of government indoctrination, whether such indoctrination be Nazi, communist, religious, or whatever.

But apparently protecting kids from private forms of indoctrination is bad ?

One is that the level of funding required is difficult to achieve, []

I’m sure communities can pass the hat around and raise money proportionate to the amount of protection they need. Or would that be too much Government ?

[] another is that protections against anti-public abuse are difficult.

No they’re not. If your private police force or army get abusive, you just fire them and hire someone else.

Yet another is the possibility of inter-corporate warfare.

Please elaborate on how that would be legal.

Army and police forces are expected protect a given land area; their funding and control should be tied to their land areas as directly as possible. That means governmental control or some other mechanism very much like governmental control; private industry doesn't qualify.

The same logic applies to education, and clearly in no way precludes privatisation in your mind.

But I do think, that spending thus-collected funds on anything not threatening the very survival of the country — such as defending from external enemies or maintaining law and order within — is immoral.

So letting the country's people starve, or not giving them an education that increases the economic prosperity of the country, is no threat to its existence ?

Please justify why the army and police cannot be substituted by private industry.

All laws are enforced "at gunpoint". Your statement is meaningless in its generality.

Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

LAN Manager might have hacked something over the top, but OS/2 was fundamentally a single-user OS, no different to DOS or MacOS.

My understanding is that NT had quite a bit of OS/2 in it.

It doesn't. They are completely different architecturally. NT was a 32-bit, multiuser, heavily multithreaded, built-for-SMP, portable, mostly-microkernel OS.

OS/2 was... Not.

Seeing that MS had rights to OS/2 and wanted a new OS in a hurry following the breakdown of their partnership with IBM, it would be suprising if they had not used parts of OS/2.

In a hurry ? It was five years between the start of NT's development ('88) and its first release ('93).

Seriously, the 8088/80286 and their addressing space limitations set back the DOS-based world by years, until Intel finally accepted that people wanted to use individual chunks of memory larger than 64K, and that they wanted to run their old real-mode DOS programs, too.

Intel wasn't the problem. The 386 was released in 1985.

Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour.

Rubbish.

It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1.

It was two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1.